Ever wonder how super angel and man-about-town Chris Sacca spends his Friday nights? Well, right now you can find him at Turntable.fm, a stealthy, you-can-only-get-in-if-you-know-someone online DJ party. I just stumbled onto it by accident. You can only gain entry if you are Facebook friends with someone already inside.
As it happens, I knew some people. Turntable.fm is a project of… Read More

RadiumOne is emerging as a leader in a new breed of advertising networks, with enhanced targeting based on social data. The company is positioning itself to lock in data sources before competitors even get rolling.
“Behavioral targeting in advertising led to double digit increases in effectiveness,” RadiumOne’s CEO Gurbaksh Chahal tells me. And he should know, this is his… Read More

We’ve been watching the British legal system turn itself into knots for the last couple of weeks, largely due to the ability of Twitter users to break just about any legal ‘super injunction’ a ‘celebrity’ (usually footballers) has on the reporting of their private life (usually affairs). So far so normal for Twitter. What’s a super injunction? It’s… Read More

Back in April, when rumors about Nintendo’s next system were flying fast, we heard there would be a user-facing camera on the controller. At the time I thought it ridiculous, but I also thought the 6″ touchscreen was ridiculous, and that seems to be accepted as fact now. So I guess it’s no surprise that a second source has confirmed that the controller will have a camera… Read More

We heard about the SD1 back in September: a Foveon-based DSLR with 45 megapixels, as they define them, though the “megapixel” rating is difficult to compare when you have different sensor patterns going on. They’re confident enough to price this thing above even Canon and Nikon’s pro level cameras. Yes, it’ll set you back $9700. That’s $2000 more than a 1D… Read More

Comcast donated $18,000 to a non-profit filmmaker’s group, the ReelGrrls, dedicated to giving young girls a voice and more confidence through film-making. One of the members expressed concern over the upcoming NBC/Comcast merger on Twitter, stating her disbelief that the FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker just quit to move to Comcast after approving the merger.
Almost immediately one of… Read More

I first met Charles Nouÿrit at Le Web in 2007. Surrounded by ‘boothe babes’ in tight white T-shirts, he was handing out cards about something called Myid.is. Was this the standard French startup pitch at Le Web? It probably was back in 2007. And it was a little hard to take the pitch, such as it was, seriously. But Identity? “ID”? Yes, it was a hot topic even then… Read More

Google is on a mission to make the Web faster. One thing that slows down pageload times are fat image files. Even JPEG and PNG files can get pretty big. So Google is developing a new image format called WebP (which is a sister format to its WebM project for videos).
The images above, for instance, are from this gallery comparing JPEG to WebP. The WebP images are significantly smaller, but… Read More

If you saw them on the street, you’d keep walking. If you saw them in an arcade, your jaw would drop. They’re called superplayers, and they make our idea of hardcore gaming look like child’s play. Instead of sitting on the couch, covered in yesterday’s food, these gamers take to the arcades and not only break records, but put on one hell of a show.
I’ve chosen… Read More

Latest Crunch Report

If you’ve seen George Clooney and Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air, you know that George Clooney’s character in the film is the epitome of a savvy, frequent flier. His life’s ambition is to accumulate miles, and he knows exactly what his rewards packages entail. Most of us, though we may similarly heavy travel schedules, are by no means masters of miles or travel rewards. Read More

I’m not going to get my hopes up – they’ve been promising a Neuromancer movie for years and, I fear, no one will be able to the book justice – but Vincenzo Natali, director of Splice and Cube, says he is in pre-production on William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk novel and they will soon begin filming in Canada, Istanbul, Tokyo, and London. Read More

Firefox beta for Android has been updated today with the ability for users to turn on the “Do Not Track” privacy feature, making it one of the first mobile browsers to offer the privacy option.
Mozilla’s Do Not Track allows users to have more control over how their browsing behavior is tracked and used online. When the feature is enabled, Firefox will tell advertising… Read More

Cast out from the ice halls of his father Othin, doomed to carry the world serpent in his teeth as he wings his justice across the face of the dead earth, great world-eater Thor is here to mete justice on us, his iron eyes hard over a blazing red beard. Woe betide he who looks upon his lover Járnsaxa with avarice for Thor mess not with that sort of thing and will totally flatten you.
Why do… Read More

Twitter CTO Greg Pass has as of today stepped down from his post at Twitter according to people familiar with the matter.
Prior to becoming Twitter CTO, Pass held the VP of engineering position at the company, after being CTO and co-founder at Summize, which was acquired by Twitter in July 2008 and was eventually turned into Twitter Search. Prior to Summize he was Systems Architect at Aol.
As… Read More

UPDATED – What appears to be a fire or explosion engulfed one of the buildings at the Foxconn Factory in Chengdu, China. Foxconn is reporting two casualties and 16 hurt and the damage does look severe and quite thorough. MICGadget reported that “10 fire engines, ambulances and 10 police cars” arrived on the scene. Reports state that a few floors in Building A5 (apparently part… Read More

I see this not as a recreation of the classic Space Invaders but rather a prediction of what will happen tomorrow, May 21st, during the predicted Rapture. Are you ready to defend Spaceship Earth? Read More

After a hit-and-run in 2006, Rob Summers lost the use of his hips, legs, feet, and toes. Five years later, Mr. Summers took a step with the help an electrical stimulator connected to his spine. A team of researchers in Louisville led by Susan Harkema (and in collaboration with UCLA and California Institute of Technology) have been working to create a way to mimic the signals the brain sends to… Read More

Gartner found that Apple is number five in European PC sales, just below Acer, Dell, and Asus. They sold 966,000 units in 1Q11, 292,000 less than the fourth place winner. But wait… there’s more! Read More

This is sort of silly but still worthwhile. Of course prices of developing technologies drop over time, but the infograph from Wired is still fun if for nothing else than a bit of nostalgic reminiscing. I can recall the first two plasmas we got while I worked at Circuit City: a Panasonic for $10k and a Pioneer for $12k. Of course that was back in the wild and crazy times of 2002 when credit… Read More

Loopt a checkin app that seems to be pulling out all the stops, has now integrated with Groupon Now! in Chicago in order to provide users withlocationally relevant realtime deals around them, notifying them when they are near a deal.
While the plan is to notify users of deals when the app isn’t even open, the time sensitive deals will also appear on place pages within Loopt, so users can… Read More

If you’re a fan of Spock, Orko, Sulu, and all the rest of those great Star Wars characters, you may want to get out a few thousand dollars when the acetate crawls from the original movies come back on the market because they’re clearly going cheap. For example, at a relatively unpublicized auction someone picked up the original Empire Strikes Back crawl for a mere $40,000… Read More

Chomp, an app search engine, has partnered with Verizon Wireless to offer an app search engine for the communications company’s mobile app marketplace, V Cast.
Chomp, which just launched an Android app that allows users to search across Google’s Android Marketplace, now allows customers to search for apps on the V Cast marketplace. Chomp now allows Verizon Wireless customers to… Read More

Paul Graham and Y Combinator just got the Wired treatment. Steven Levy writes a long and loving article which evokes what it’s like to go through the program (or at least what it’s like to be a fly on the wall watching startups who go through the program). A big part of the Y Combinator experience is learning from Paul Graham, who is like a Jedi master for startups. Graham is… Read More

USB 3.0 devices have been available since late 2009. I tested several first-gen USB 3.0 external hard drives in early 2010 and the spec hit several laptop platforms a bit after that. Still, even though it’s nearly halfway through 2011 now, USB 3.0-equipped computers are rare. One Lenovo product manager expects the spec to hit the big time next year. Read More

Have you ever visited a city, country or even store and found an original, unique product or item that you’ve never seen before? AHAlife is an e-commerce sites for hard-to-find and exclusive luxury lifestyle products, curated by ‘tastemakers’ from around the world.
AHAlife introduces one new product a day in editorial format through its email list, tells the story about how… Read More

Honeycomb is Google’s purpose-built tablet interface that uses a radically different interface than 2.x Android builds. However, it seems that at certain resolutions, Honeycomb tablets reverts to a Gingerbread-ish interface. Hardcore hacking isn’t required, either. All it takes is a Honeycomb tablet that’s been granted root access and then an app that switched the pixel… Read More

Remember Modu, the Israeli phone maker who never quite found a market for its itty bitty cell phones? That’s ok if you don’t, because the semi-omniscient Google does. Back in 2008, Modu came up with a tiny modular cell phone that could slip into a number of different sleeves to be able to perform different actions and functions. Read More

$12 for a name brand 4GB MP3 player? Yessir! I’ll take two. It’s even better with free shipping to Prime subscribers or for any order totaling $25 or more. The Amazon reviewers haven’t marked the player very high, but most complaints seem trivial: the buttons aren’t backlit, low bitrate files sound like garbage, and the shuffle feature is broken. Still, it’s… Read More

This is either completely stupid or I am missing something major: Tokyo-based crap gadget maker Thanko strikes again with the so-called “iPad Flexible Arm” [JP]. The idea here is to make it easier for owners to use tablets (both in a vertical and horizontal position) while lying in bed. Read More

About a year ago, Stanford University students Dan Ha and Cameron Teitelman co-founded SSE Labs, a startup accelerator designed to assist aspiring entrepreneurs at the university develop their businesses and provide them with the space and educational resources they need to grow a successful business. At the time, the Stanford student government (which operates independently of the university)… Read More